The summer of 2024 will be remembered for many things, but here at the Center for Progressive Reform, what most struck us was that it was the year that the administrative state broke through into public consciousness. From the unexpected virality of, and backlash against, Project 2025 — a massive right-wing legal manifesto as aggressive as it was arcane — to the Supreme Court regulatory rulings that made headlines for weeks, this year’s political news drove home that the work we do to protect the environment, the workforce, and public health matters very much to we, the people when these things are under attack.
Our scholars and staff have been busier than ever, fielding media requests, granting interviews, publishing their own writing, hosting convenings, and appearing on webinars. Journalists, community advocates, and public officials have turned to our network of experts not just to make sense of where we are, but to understand the paths that lie ahead.
Meanwhile, climate and energy justice continue to require all hands on deck, from our scholars who contribute to policy across the United States to the coalition partners we advise on state and local campaigns. The statistics remain dire, and there’s always a new one to share, or another extreme weather record broken. But across the movement for environmental justice — in communities and classrooms — there is a heightened sense of excitement and commitment to the work we are going to do together to right this ship for everyone.
In this context, we approach the task of inviting new members to join us in our work with seriousness, but also with much excitement. This spring, we reviewed nearly two dozen exceptional candidates from the fields of law and public policy. Today, we are pleased to announce that we have a cohort of three excellent scholars to add to our ranks:
Rachel Emma Rothschild is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She holds a J.D., cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she was a Furman Academic Scholar, and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from Princeton University. Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, she was a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity, where she remains an affiliated scholar.
Rothschild’s scholarship sits at the intersection of law, history, and policy. She is the author of Poisonous Skies: Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution and has written numerous articles and essays on pollution problems for academic journals and media outlets. Her recent research examines the regulation of toxic substances and efforts to address climate change.
Danielle Stokes is an Associate Professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of property, environmental law, and environmental justice, with a focus on sustainability and equity in land use planning. Her scholarship has appeared in book chapters and law journals including the Minnesota Law Review, Boston University Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. Her work has also been featured in several media outlets, including Business Insider and E&E News.
Prior to joining academia, Professor Stokes worked in land use and real estate law at McGuireWoods. She is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the University of Virginia School of Law.
Daniel E. Walters is an Associate Professor of Law at the Texas A&M University School of Law. Prior to joining the Texas A&M faculty, he was an Assistant Professor of Law at Penn State Law, and before that a Regulation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law. He earned a JD from the University of Michigan Law School and a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Walters writes about administrative and regulatory law, with a particular focus on the implications of democratic theory for the administrative state, on public participation in administrative processes, on deference doctrines, on empirical studies of administrative behavior, and on the court-agency relationship. He also writes about climate change and energy law, with an emphasis on electric transmission lines, grid governance, the food-climate nexus, and climate legislation. His articles have appeared in many of the top journals in law and public administration, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Administrative Law Review, Ecology Law Quarterly, and the Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory (JPART), and many others. He is a co-editor, with Cary Coglianese, of the forthcoming Regulation in a Turbulent Era. Since 2020, he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Administrative & Regulatory Law News, the ABA Section’s quarterly magazine.
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The Center for Progressive Reform is a community of public intellectuals, and each of these terms will mean something different to different people. But uniting all our work is the belief that our obligation to change the world is strengthened by better understanding it, and that the value of public research should only be measured by the material impact it has on people living in the real world. Where these twin vocations overlap is the home of the public scholar. We are proud and grateful that professors Rothschild, Stokes, and Walters will be joining us in that work.